X-amining XSE #1-4

"Time Lost" / "Future Intense" / "Future Betrayed" / "Conflagration" 

November 1996 - February 1997

In a Nutshell

Bishop and Shard's pasts revealed! 

Writer: John Ostrander
Penciler: Chris Gardner, 
Inkers: Terry Austin & Tom Palmer

Art: Deodator Studios / Mozart Cuto (issues #2-4)
Letters: Richard Starkings & Comicraft

Colors: Derek Bellman, Shannon Blanchard (issues #3-4)

Enhancements: Graphic Color Works, Malibu (issue #3)

Editor: Kelly Corvese
Editor-in-Chief: Bob Harras

Plot

Having accepted the holographic Shard as his sister, Bishop invites her to the X-Mansion in an effort to convince her to join X-Men. Shard is reluctant, not wanting to be seen only as Bishop's little sister. Bishop uses the Danger Room's holographic capabilities to explore the siblings' past. They revisit their harsh childhood and eventual recruitment into the XSE, where they are attacked by a group of Emplates during a training mission. Bishop's actions during that attack lead to him becoming a full XSE officer; a year later, Shard graduates as well. Years later, Bishop is made a squad commander and makes the unconventional choice to appoint Malcolm and Randall - two underpowered mutants who don't really like each other - to his squad. Ultimately, the team bonds during an attack on Harmony Base, a colony in which humans and mutants live together. Meanwhile, the ambitious Shard rises through the XSE ranks, becoming Bishop's superior officer while helping develop new holographic technology. When Bishop participates in a field test of the new technology and proves it doesn't work, he tries to mend things with Shard by giving her a tip he received from the captive Fitzroy about the location of the anti-human Exhumes' base. However, all Shard finds at the base is a pack of Emplates, and her squad is overwhelmed, with Shard herself infected. When Bishop arrived on the scene, Shard begs him to kill her before she becomes an Emplate. Instead, he takes her to the Witness where, in exchange for a year of Bishop's service, Shard's memories are downloaded into a holographic projector to preserve her existence. Back at the X-Mansion, Shard is touched to realize how much Bishop sacrificed for her, and agrees to stay with him among the X-Men, but in the course of their reminiscences, Bishop has come to realize she needs to build her own life with X-Factor. 

Firsts and Other Notables

While this limited series uses a framing device of Bishop and Shard reminiscing about their past under the guise of Bishop trying to convince his sister to join the X-Men, it essentially serves as a great big infodump about Bishop and Shard's lives before they both ended up traveling back in time, starting when they were children and skimming ahead through their recruitment into the XSE, Shard's death, and ending with Bishop following Fitzroy back in time and into his first appearance in Uncanny X-Men #282. 

Written by John Ostander (who wrote the first Bishop miniseries), several future-set characters and events referenced in that series' flashbacks to Bishop's time in the future get introduced or fleshed out in the course of this miniseries. One of which is the Summer's Rebellion, first mentioned in Bishop #3, which is established here as the event which broke the Sentinels' control of America (as seen in "Days of Future Past") and led to a shaky peace between humans and mutants, with the veterans of the Summers Rebellion forming the Xavier Security Enforcers as a means to maintain that peace by showing humans that mutants were willing and able to police their own (Peter David will later dive deeper into the events of the Summers Rebellion in X-Factor volume 3). 

As a counterpoint to the XSE, this series establishes that the "Exhumes" are mutants who refuse to live in coexistence with humans and believe in mutant supremacy. Daemon, the leader of the Exhumes who makes his first appearance in issue #1, will return in the later Summers Rebellion story in X-Factor. 

We get one of the early "maybe Storm is Bishop's grandmother?" teases in issue #1, as we see Bishop and Shard's grandmother for the first time, and she looks like an older Storm and is said to have once been a member of the X-Men. 

Hecat'e, the leader of the XSE when Bishop and Shard join up who was first mentioned in the earlier miniseries, makes her first appearance here; she will return on Ostrander's later Bishop: XSE miniseries. 

Fitzroy, of course, makes a couple appearances in the story, appearing as a young boy (with incorrectly-colored hair) in Bishop and Shard's XSE academy class when they first join up and later during the events which lead to Bishop going back in time.

It's revealed here that Fitzroy is the illegitimate son of Anthony Shaw (descendant of Sebastian Shaw), and that he was given the surname "Fitzroy" by his father as it was a term used to denote a royal bastard in medieval times (Fitzroy's age in this series is inconsistent with some of his later appearance; here, he and Bishop are both boys of around 10-12 years when they join the XSE, years after the Summers Rebellion ended and the XSE formed, but later, Fitzroy will be shown to be an active adult participant in the Summers Rebellion, with a specific event occurring therein responsible for making him the morally empty person he's shown to be here).  

The previously-referenced "Emplates" appear in this series, functioning basically as vampires with little mouth hands (like their presumed progenitor, Generation X's Emplate) that infect and turn others into Emplates. It's also revealed that Shard died as a result of an Emplate infection, leading to Bishop preserving her as a hologram. 

Malcolm and Randall's recruitment is detailed here, with Randall shown to be someone more convinced of his abilities than his low-level "detects radiation" power would suggest while Malcolm is the son of an upper class family desperate to prove himself; they too will feature in the next Bishop limited series as well. 

Mountjoy, the villain introduced in the last Bishop miniseries before falling in with the London Hellfire Club over in Excalibur, appears briefly as well. 

Picking up on something first teased in Uncanny X-Men #287, it's revealed here that the Witness, the suspiciously Gambit-esque figure who witness the deaths of the X-Men at the hands of the X-traitor, looked after Bishop and Shard for a period of time when they were young, and taught Bishop something of his skills as a thief. It is also established that an adult Bishop worked for the Witness for a year in payment for his help in saving Shard's life, further fueling the animosity between them as suggested in Uncanny #287. 

In a bit of accidental foreshadowing, when Bishop dons a high tech cybernetic arm while working for the Witness, he ends up looking a lot like he will during the late 00s and early 10s, after he goes crazy, loses an arm, has it replaced by an actual bionic arm, and spends all his time hunting Cable and Hope through time. 

Shard's mind being transferred into a holographic matrix occurs in issue #4, setting the stage for her current existence. 

A Work in Progress

Hancock, a blind former XSE officer who helped raise Bishop and Shard introduced in the earlier Bishop miniseries, appears again in issue #1. 

It's revealed here that Bishop was inspired to join the XSE when they helped save Shard from an Exhume when they were kids. 

Randall quotes Nightcrawler at one point. 

Shard's mutant power is said to be the ability to convert light into concussive force. 

During one of the cutaways back to the present day framing sequence at the X-Mansion, Bishop and Shard walk past a picture on the wall that almost looks like Arkon (who met the X-Men and romanced Storm in X-Men Annual #3), though it's not clear why they'd have a picture of him hanging on their wall.  

Fitzroy's band of hooligans use the name "Hellions", in another case of the futuristic setting repurposing names and terms with meaning to readers. 

The Witness is said to be the head of the Stark-Fujikawa corporation, a nod to Marvel's 2099 imprint of books, in which that same company is major player in several of the 2099 series. They are also responsible for helping preserve Shard and creating her initial holographic matrix that ultimately led to her resurrection in the present day. 

Shackle, the Witness' mysterious attendant, is revealed to be a former XSE officer who once saved Bishop's life. 

It's revealed here that the mission to hunt down the escaped Fitzroy by following him through his time portal, which led to Bishop being stranded in the past and Malcolm and Randall dying, was Bishop's first mission with the XSE after his one year spent working with the Witness (which doesn't quite fit with the established narrative, as Uncanny X-Men #287 has Bishop chasing Fitzroy, finding the X-Mansion subbasement and Jean Grey's message revealing the X-Traitor, going to the Witness, then returning to find Fitzroy fled back in time). 

Young Love

Shard and Fitzroy are established as having had a brief romantic relationship before he left the XSE. 

The Grim 'n' Gritty 90s

This is right around the time that Marvel started experimenting with variant covers (a practice that has since become more or less an industry standard on a wide range of issues), and the first issue of this series was published with two different covers. 

Austin's Analysis

There are several things working against this miniseries. One is the timing of it; I'm not sure if readers were ever clamoring for more detailed information about Bishop and Shard's past and the inner workings of the paramilitary organization to which they belonged, but if such clamor ever existed, I can't imagine it was intensifying in late 1996, after Bishop's whole arc up to that point had been resolved in "Onslaught" with the ending of the X-Traitor plotline. Sure, Shard was at the time becoming a more integral member of X-Factor, but I have to imagine there's a trickle down effect in terms of Bishop and Shard's popularity (and this mini is heavily weighted towards Bishop material anyway). 

Another problem is the art, which is so inconsistent it doesn't even get credited to a sole artist. Instead "Deodato Studios", a collection of artists working to ape Mike Deodato's style at the time, gets credit. Which means we have no idea who is drawing what, and also, that while the overall style remains largely consistent, specific figures and approaches to storytelling can vary wildly from page to page (to say nothing of differences between issues). And it's not like that style, however consistently rendered, is all that exciting anyway. Finally, the series suffers from the decision to use a present day framing device, meaning each issue features a couple-three cutaways each to Bishop and Shard, just hanging out at the X-Mansion, to setup and further the notion that the future-set events being depicted are reminiscences on their part. It's largely unnecessary, as the present day Bishop and Shard bring no new or clever context to the events in the past (there's no instance where, for example, Bishop and Shard prove an unreliable narrator, or provide commentary gifted by hindsight to the events or anything like that); it's basically just them sitting down to breakfast or whatever and going "remember that time we..." before it cuts to the future. There's a mild arc to it all - in the end, Bishop urges Shard to go off and be her own person, giving up his desire for her to join him on the X-Men - but for the most part, it's just pointless filler. 

Yet for all that, this series isn't terrible. John Ostrander clearly has some affection for this material and it shows in the way he's clearly put some effort into depicting Bishop's future as of a piece with the "Days of Future Past" reality but also distinct from it, still dystopic but in different ways. I'm also not above enjoying a story that attempts to take a bunch of tossed off references and unresolved mysteries scattered by a variety of creators across multiple titles and tie them all together into a coherent narrative, which Ostrander is mostly successfully at here. But the downside to that approach is that, at times, the whole series reads a little too much like the "Leonard DiCaprio pointing" meme, coasting on familiarity with (or at least vague recollection of) those references to get by. "Hey, it's the Summers Rebellion, Bishop mentioned that before!", "those are the Emplates!", "that's what the Witness meant when he said Bishop was back so soon!" Ultimately, without a more engaging framing device or compelling character arc to the present day stuff (beyond, "remember when these things happened?"), and lacking a stronger artistic collaborator to help elevate the material, all that's left to the series is that connective material. It reads more like an illustrated Wikipedia entry than a story, and that's just not enough to carry the series on its own. 

Next Issue

Next week: a new month of issues finally begins, as Gladiator fights Cannonball in Uncanny X-Men #341 and Nate Grey battles Morbius in X-Man #24!

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